The final evening of the Republican Convention gave us a glimpse of what it would have been like if McCain had gone with his instincts and picked a candidate close to his heart. The first and second night highlighted his opponents in the primaries; Thompson, Romney and especially Giuliani. All of them gave fine and stirring speeches making you wonder how the back-of-the-pack, least popular, almost non-Republican, managed to slip by in such a short time and beat these excellent candidates to the finish line. Of course, the headliner was Palin, the best speaker of either convention giving the best-written speech of either convention with a build-up that a billion dollars worth of advertising couldn't buy. She emerged as the candidate we should have chosen for the top of the ticket. But we didn't.
So on this last night, after the opponents had stood up to honorably give their support to the nominee and the new Star Was Born on the previous nights, we had the Parade Of The Cronies.
Lindsay Grahamnesty got up and spoke. How do speakers this bad manage to get people to vote for them? It was awful. I don't remember a word he said. It was all delivered in this broken monotone. He lost the crowd's attention after a couple of minutes and just rambled on until he sputtered to a stop. Groan. This guy just radiates 'lightweight'. A good pick for Secretary Of Paper-Clip Allotments in the new administration.
Then came Ridge. This was the caliber of human who was on the 'short list' of VP choices. His selection as the VP pick would have ended the Republican Party as a political entity in this country. To steal a Monthy Python quote, "Dull, dull, dull...Oh God he's dull!" My head was spinning. I suspected that my wife had slipped some liquid codeine into my Diet Vernors so she could slip out for a fast fling with one of the Mexican yardboys. This guy made Grahamnesty seem like Cicero before the Senate. But Ridge and the equally weak Lieberman were the candidates of McCain's soggy, liberal, mosseaten heart. All the fire and truth of the previous evenings, the evenings with the real Republicans, were gone in the Dance Of The Aisle-Crossers; a ballet preformed with the dancers dressed in hidebound cliches and stomping clumsily to the rhythm of the Bi-Partisan minuet. Diaghalev meets a political Salvadore Dali, I thought my TV was going to melt and run down onto the hardwood floor from this concrete idiocy.
But they weren't done. Not by a long shot. The haymaker that would put us into a deep coma was on the way. Cindy McCain. Now, I know what you're thinking. You've all read my previous remarks that I think Michelle Obama is the O-bomb-a! Her eyes, the set of her chin, the way she moves, that's a compelling Democrat! Cindy? Not so much, but its not for lack of raw materials, its for lack of trying. She looks good, dresses sharp, she's naturally very good looking in a way that plays well on the tube...a then she spoke. She spoke for a long time I think. The syrupy platitudes rolled out like a Mississippi of mush delivered in a voice honed to forensic excellence at the Minnie Mouse Academy Of Oratory. The most memorable moment of Cindy McCain's speech for me was when my wife walked in the room, shook me and said, "Will you stop snoring!" I took a walk into the back yard to clear my head.
When I got back it was dinner time so having to set the table and lock all the cats inside (there have been some coyote kills in the neighborhood recently so we trap them inside at sundown)
prevented any further attacks of politically-induced narcolepsy and made me miss the McCain film except in passing. It looked like a typical political bio. Instantly forgettable.
And then, there he was! The Wrinkly Old White Dude. The speech chugged on and on. I guess he was hoping that the narcotizing effect of the previous speakers had numbed the audience into paralysis and we were laying there like a boatload of stunned mullets letting this drivel wash over us. He ended on a more emotional note, evoking his heroism and then launching into an upbeat rhetorical flurry but it was sad after the previous evening.
And what does this go to show? It shows that the Republican Party has incredible vitality and life but it has become the home of some of the most dull, visionless functionaries and equivocators in the universe. The McCain crowd. The Bush crowd.
So, why do I support the guy, you ask? When it came to a choice between being groovy and bi-partisan and fighting to win McCain bypassed the Ridges, Pawlentys and Liebermans and selected a candidate that sent a giant jolt of energy through the party and dealt a crushing blow to the Democrat's attempt to win the hearts and minds of the Middle. When it came to a choice between losing civily and all-out-war he chose all-out-war. He could see the sorry sight his bi-partisan friends present and he knows he needs conservatives completely on his side because we like to fight too. We've been yearning for a fight. McCain knows about strategy and he knows that once you commit yourself to a struggle this intense there is no turning back. He's a conservative whether he likes it or not. A conservative who had been a joke to the Democrats, Bush's Third Term, an old Dole-like duffer, who would be easily pushed aside had now landed some telling blows and produced in Palin a candidate who just by her mere presence is a declaration of Total War to the libs. They are more than angry. They will attack McCain with attacks that will make their eight year verbal assault on the milquetoast Bush look like timid satire. So McCain has put us onboard and then bet the farm. This election is the showdown and we have a cunning, aggressive leader who is now stepped over the line and is landing blows. Do you think that if the Dems are robbed of a victory this November in an election that made Sarah Palin into the most prominent woman in the country that they are going to be in a 'bi-partisan' mood? Add raging partisan hatred to the natural antagonism between the Executive and Legislative branches and the chances of McCain turning into a liberal Bush-Bunny are zero. He is trapped in conservatism whether he likes it or not. The most important thing to this guy is winning. He can't win without us.

There was just a giant disruption in people's lives all up and down the Gulf Coast from Brownsville to Tampa. It wasn't Gustav, which was a tropical depression which briefly turned into a Category One hurricane before it broke up into a mass of rainy clouds. Bad weather, lots of rain. Bring the dog indoors and take the laundry off the line.
But the approach of this minor climatic event did not go unnoticed in the corridors of power. The geniuses who run our country would normally be indifferent to a few of their lowly constituents becoming more soggy than usual but three years ago a Category Four monster named Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and flooded a major city. The Governor of Louisiana had completely panicked as the storm approached and refused federal aid. The Mayor of New Orleans, in one of the most spectacular displays of cowardice in modern history went to pieces in a hotel room as his police force disintegrated and ran for their lives with emergency lights flashing and sirens screaming. Some of them were found in their police cars as far away as Florida in the next days. The feeble idiot in charge of FEMA spent a critical afternoon getting a massage and manicure and so wasn't available to take calls about Katrina until it was too late.
Helpless residents of old folks homes and tens of thousands of shut-ins and agoraphobics remained in New Orleans in the deadly path of the storm and either died or ended up on roofs waving desperately at the Coast Guard and Army helicopters which the hapless Bush finally sent to the stricken city.
The media, looking for a way to smack the detested Bush, accented the federal role in this catastrophic screw-up and completely downplayed the disgraceful role of the local Democratic officials in the not-so-funny comedy of governmental ineptitude. Katrina became a byword for Bush's aloof racist incompetence.
In the three years that followed we've been treated to a further display of reasons why we should be wary of government 'solutions' to urgent problems. People were parked, at taxpayer expense, in luxury hotels for years. Every house trailer built in the last fifteen years was purchased and dumped into muddy vacant lots in Arkansas and Tennessee to sink into the mire or be hauled off as scrap. There were enough of these empty double-wides to accommodate the population of New York City if the need arose but they were never used for anyone anywhere. People were handed cash-cards that some of them used to get lap-dances at strip clubs and God knows what else!
So as Gustav approached the Gulf Coast, after there being no significant storms for a couple of years. The pols panicked. No one wanted to be in the path of a political hurricane that could destroy careers and devastate political livelihoods. In Mel Brook's documentary about the functions of government, 'Blazing Saddles', the dimunitive Governor Lepetomane stands up and declares loudly, "Gentlemen! We have our phony-baloney JOBS to protect!" The watchword of modern government. The first step was to order the largest transfer of human population, at gunpoint, since Stalin ordered all the Germans out of East Prussia and Silesia. The roads were jammed leading inland from every part of the Gulf Coast for hundreds of miles. Then the media began to cite concerns about the levees in New Orleans holding up under this Category ONE assault!
Hang on a minute BabaLooey! This is THREE YEARS after Katrina and the feds have spent $160 BILLION dollars on post-Katrina fixes and those punks haven't fixed those danged levees yet? $160 BILLION dollars is ten times the amount spent on the Chunnel, the largest civil engineering project in human history. That means they had enough money to build five Chunnels, the Great Wall Of China, the Eiffel Tower and the Panama Canal and years to do it and those levees cant handle a minor tropical depression! And you guys are against waterboarding? We're just waterboarding the wrong people. Instead of abusing innocent Muslim Terrorists whoever is supposed to be fixing those levees should be the first to enjoy a session followed by the biggest money-hungry loudmouth in all of this business, that stupid cow Mary Landreau.
So Gustav spared us the Opening Night of the Republican Convention, and for that many thanks to God and Gustav. The blazing rhetoric of a Bush or even a Cheney is best enjoyed in the privacy of one's own fundraiser with the doors locked and the shades drawn, not in public where the leftist rats in the press can take a hearty swing at it. Those guys are mad since their shameless plugging of Obama's Euro Victory Tour made his poll numbers drop and they are looking for victims. A profile which Bush and Cheney fit nicely. I'll bet McCain's real upset that they dont get to show up and make Obama's point that he's just four more years of Bush. Real upset.
So, as the clouds that were Gustav spread out over Texas and Oklahoma, as they dump buckets of rain in Arkansas and Tennessee, as creeks run over in northern Mississippi and Alabama the Republicans will assemble this evening in Minneapolis, freed of their embarrassing obligation to laud the unpopular Bush, the author of the party's grievous state and bow down in tribute to the Fertility Goddess, the forty-five year old Grandma, our mistress of the Snowmobile, the Maiden Of The Oil Rig, the Working Class Heroine and The Wrinkly Old White Dude as they show up those sappy Democrats and their convention dominated by a terminal cancer victim and her two autistic children and show the libs what an upbeat, upsurge convention is supposed to be like!

Now that Hillary's big mouth has ended any dim hope she might have had to even be considered as Vice President, let alone President, the amusing game of watching the struggle for the Democratic nomination is over. All the mayhem and vituperation is receding and the ebbing tide of conflict is leaving any of us who still consider ourselves Republicans with a ghastly prospect.
Today's International Herald Tribune has an article entitled 'Some Republicans Sense Disorder In The McCain Campaign' (http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/25/america/campaign.php). This article could have been written a year ago when McLame's giant, overfunded monstrosity of a campaign for the nomination foundered on the rocks of Republican base rage against his Amnesty Bill and from his sheer managerial incompetence. Only the total ineptitude of his opponents and McLame's support by the inside-the-beltway political hacks saved his scrawny neck and allowed the cranky old duffer to gain the nomination by winning thin pluralities in two or three primaries. But if McLame and the Republican hacks are counting on blue collar whites to throw a racist hissy-fit and vote for the party who are now seen as the authors of all this country's problems they are living in a dream world. Instead of sniveling about their 'broken brand', a marketing term worthy of the contemptible hacks they have become, the Republicans should 're-brand' themselves like any failing enterprise.
"We're the Republicans and we want to solve the oil crisis by drilling for oil!"
How does that sound?
"We're the Republicans and we want to build nuclear power plants to meet America's electricity needs in a way we can afford!"
Simple, understandable.
"We're the Republicans. The Democrats have opposed sane energy policies for the last thirty years and we're here to say that the country has got to change direction before things get a whole lot worse!"
Have we got your attention?
"We're the Republicans. Running from the Middle East like a bunch of whipped little sissies will hand control of the world's energy supplies to our enemies, destroy any respect we have in the world and lead to the deaths of millions of people who trusted us and worked with us to fight the War On Terror."
Bring the war to the enemy. Stop cowering. Its Bush's accommodation to liberalism which is the problem and the cure is NOT more liberalism.
People have been calling the Republican Party the 'stupid party'. Thats an insult to the Democrats who have been the originators of every stupid, destructive idea that has stalked this land for the last half-century and who should hold that title permanently. The Republicans arent even coherent enough these days to be called either 'stupid' or a 'party'. The time serving hacks who make up the leadership have been so corrupted by their 1994-2006 control of the legislature and eight-year control of the White House that they have forgotten that this is a democracy and that occasionally even the most powerful politician is called upon to explain himself to the people who elected him. The great divide, the day the Inside-The-Beltway establishment broke from their base was the day President Bush and the Congress tried to sneak the McLame-Kennedy Amnesty Bill under the radar and into law without any public debate. Thats when they labeled themselves as true Enemies Of The People. The fact that every single Democratic legislator supported it doesnt lessen the sin of the President and The Maverick who were pushing a bill to gain cheap labor for their cronies and who were nursing the hallucination that somehow these exploited poor people would instantly become Grateful Republican voters. In the campaign for the nomination which followed no Republican stood up, pointed their finger at McLame and screamed, "this guy wrote the bill which gave the Mexican Government the power to veto us building a fence along our border, the bill which adds twenty million people to the Food Stamp, Social Security and welfare rolls,the bill which gives drivers licenses and motor-voter registration cards to every foreigner who wants them!" No Republican has EVER stood up and pointed to the Democrats and accused them of supporting flooding this country with illegal aliens and setting up a free-for-all medical care system which puts YOU in the same line at the Federal Clinic as anybody who can sneak across the border and leaves YOU to foot the bill from your payroll, excise and property taxes, basically using taxes on the Middle Class to subsidize employers who are too cheap to provide medical coverage to their underpaid helots. Who is speaking for the working people in this country as the Democrats talk about further hamstringing the energy companies with new taxes and regulations while they pour hundreds of billions into the 'alternative energy' rathole?
NOT THE REPUBLICANS thats for sure.
The Dems and the enviro-kooks have managed to put the overpopulated Polar Bear on the Endangered Species list even as they breed like rats on the expanding polar ice cap but the real endangered species are Republicans. They cant even hold on to seats in Congress that they have held for fifty years. Like the Wooly Mammoth their reason to exist has disappeared and we await this November's slaughter at the hands of the Socialist Cro-Magnons.

I was channel surfing last night. I happened onto CSPAN and blundered into what I thought was a symposium on interracial gay marriage but which actually turned out to be the Obama-Edwards love fest. The wonderfulness flowed from my TV screen like a gusher of warm milk. Except...
I missed Edwards' speech (thanks to a merciful God!) but I think Obama had just started speaking . As he spoke, some nonsense about ending poverty in ten years, I looked past him at the crowd in the background. They were happy and not paying attention ! This riveting rhetoric wasnt registering in their minds at all. Why is that? Because the people Obama is trying to reach, the blue-collar working class whites, have heard all this getting rid of poverty crap for decades and they know it for the lying idiocy that it is. Furthermore, blue-collar working class whites think poor people should stop smoking pot and drinking malt liquor in the middle of the day and go get a job. But these were Obama's fans and his driveling idiocy didnt bother them unduly. They all had signs that said 'CHANGE' and if achieving 'CHANGE' required them to listen to the same old crap they've been hearing for decades then they're willing to sacrifice an hour or two for the cause.
How could Obama have reached them? What could he have said that would make them think he understands their problems and wants to make a difference in their lives? What is the most important day to day issue in most people's lives right now?
Gasoline prices, thats what! People who live in Woodland Hills and commute to their jobs in Burbank...or fill in the town names with whatever ones are familiar to you...have had a giant chunk of cash removed from their pockets and they already were just making the minimum payments on their maxed-out credit cards (interest rates way up BTW). Food prices also have skyrocketed, not a thing that the middle managers are going to notice but the blue-collar working class whites are finding themselves out of cash and maxed-out on credit. They see expenses going up and their salaries staying the same. They're also seeing a giant rise in taxation. Here in California our beloved Jerkinator has just informed us that we are on the hook for billions, thanks to our thrifty Democrat legislators, and my own mayor Antonio VivaLaRaza, in charge of a city where more than half the employees make more than $100,000 per annum, is informing us that somehow there's a horrible shortfall in the city budget and we're in for some heavy tax hikes from that direction.
So what kind of 'CHANGE' do blue-collar working class whites want? They want the boa-constrictor which is strangling their existences to at least loosen its grip. So far Dem propaganda has been successful blaming all this mayhem on GW Bush and the Republicans and because they're half right, the moronic liberal 'Republicans' who bred like maggots in the Compassionate One's administration and who have adopted increasingly liberal positions are responsible for letting a lot of this happen. The ethanol disaster that is raising food prices and causing starvation overseas is a bi-partisan operation to rob the treasury and the fact that its squeezing blue-collar working class whites by raising their food prices doesnt occur to these geniuses as they stuff their pockets. But it occurs to blue-collar working class whites as they see their President lauding the crooked and useless ethanol program and they blame the REPUBLICANS for this stupidity.
Rising gas prices? They've watched Bush messing around in the Middle East without ever saying anything about oil supplies but endlessly droning on about 'Democracy In Iraq', a subject that blue-collar working class whites care nothing about. Now all these grateful Ay-rabs that we went over to Democratize are jacking up the gas prices and using the money they've squeezed from blue-collar working class whites to fund terrorists and build Wahabbi mosques all over the country as the REPUBLICANS dont say a word.
But now blue-collar working class whites are taking a dangerous gamble. They want 'CHANGE' and that's what Barak Obama is offering. A way out of the REPUBLICAN mess we're in. Except, what exactly is this guy going to do about gasoline prices? Drill for oil and increase the supply perhaps? Nah, not even the REPUBLICANS want to get that extreme. The Rep response is to send W Bush to Saudi Arabia to crawl at the throne of King Abdullah and beg for higher production. McLame is still babbling about his giant Global Warming tax increase and doesnt seem to notice that there's a problem with gas or food prices or that his beloved Democrats are pushing policies that will make them worse. The Obama response is to level a tax on 'windfall profits' earned by the oil companies. He's going to lower gasoline prices by taxing the people who sell gasoline, 98% of the price of which is composed of the cost of buying, refining and transporting it and state and federal gasoline taxes. That should work, even though when Jimmy The Jerk tried it in the 70's it caused shortages and chaos. Blue-collar working class whites and all the rest of us are in for a rude shock this January when Obama takes office with a heavily Dem Congress.

This morning I was reading an article on Real Clear politics entitled 'Where Have All The Republicans Gone?' by Gary Andres. Its the usual collection of demographic tables that essentially misses the forest because it is studying the trees too intently. The most egregious mistake that all these Inside-The -Beltway types are making is the decline of registered Republicans and a consequent rise in the number of Independents, and thinking this represents people drifting left towards the Democrats. That mistake underlies the entire premise of the McLame campaign; he thinks he will drift left with the electorate and score big. Just the fact that McLame and his advisors are so completely WRONG about something so fundamental underlines what a completely unqualified candidate for the presidency he is. The rise in Independents is a result of conservatives being appalled and shocked time and time again by the drift by the Republicans toward facilitating big government as the solution to every problem and the unwillingness of most Republican office holders to oppose or even debate the Democrats on any issue. As soon as there is a confrontation the left-wing media publishes a bunch of polls and the Republicans run and hide like a bunch of whipped little sissies. A large portion of the blame for this has to be laid at the feet of the party's so-called leader. Bush has spent his entire time in office being 'non-confrontational' to people who were calling him a homicidal retard. He didnt push ANWR or offshore drilling and his reward from his Democratic party-pals was to be called a tool of Big Oil. Now that we have a petroleum crunch and gas prices are rising it is, of course, Bush's fault! You can go down the line on issue after issue where Bush has turned his back on the people who elected him and sought comity with his sworn enemies. He has actively favored opportunists and non-ideological types in his appointments, and in fact left almost all the Clinton appointees in place in the CIA and State Departments, ensuring leaks and betrayals aplenty. He could have realized the destructive results of a McLame nomination on the party and recognized McLame's total unfitness both as a candidate and a president. McLame hated Bush and did everything he could to sabotage him and his fellow Republicans in the Senate. But did Bush openly or tacitly support any one of the much more acceptable and qualified candidates who were available or groom one of his own? No, the head of the party sat silent, just as he did while Dummy Hastert and Spending-Bill Frist turned the legislature into a welfare office for crooked corporate donors and a halfway house for closeted deviants.
None of it matters. This is going to be a Dem tidal wave. The crooked corporate donors and the closeted deviants are all solidly backing the Dems. All this fighting and tearing on the Dem side wont hurt them a bit; they're not arguing about the issues but about personalities and it seems certain that Obama has it locked up or will shortly. A damaged Clinton with an alienated black vote might have been a contest for a REPUBLICAN candidate, but for a sawed-off, superannuated, ultra liberal, hot-tempered aisle-crosser? Either of these extremely flawed, incompetent militantly left-wing Dems could beat McLame. What liberal in their right mind is going to vote for a liberal McLame when they can vote for a liberal Obama? Even a lot of Republicans will be voting for Obama or some looney Bob Barr third party candidate just to send a message to the arrogant hacks who promoted McLame's takeover of the party.
See you on the bread lines!

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/04/where_
have_all_the_republicans.html